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John Screven 



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ADDRESS 

OP 

Colonel John Screven 

DELIVERED AT THE 

FIRST ANNUAL DINNER 

OF 

The Sons of the Revolution 

ON 

February 8. i8g2, 

AT 

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA 



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Forty-five copies only of this booh have been printed, 
and reserved exclusively for private distribution. 



No. 



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FOREWORD. 



The Society of the Sons of the Revolution, in 
the State of Georgia, was instituted in the city of 
Savannah, on the 2 ad day of May, 1891, and is 
required, by the terms of the 14th By-Law, to 
hold an Annual Meeting on the 5th of February, 
in every year, except when such date shall fall on 
Friday, Saturday or Sunday, in which case the 
meeting shall be held on the following Monday. 
The 5th of February was chosen to commemorate 
the adoption and promulgation of the first Con- 
stitution of Georgia, in the year 1777. It is a 
further standing regulation of the Society that the 



(3) 



members shall, when practicable, hold a Com- 
memorative Celebration, and dine together at 
least once a year. Accordingly, the date of the 
first Annual Meeting was also made the time for 
the first social gathering of the Society's members. 
The dinner was given at the De Soto Hotel, and 
the tables were set in the banquet-room in the 
shape of a diamond, with the space in the centre, 
representing a star, in the midst of which was a 
profusion of potted plants, the edges being trailed 
with running vines. 

The Society then numbered seventy-seven mem- 
,bers, of whom thirty-seven occupied seats at this, 
its first dinner , and, by a happy thought of one 



of that number, this brochure, containing the first 
speech of the occasion — that of the Society's 
President, Colonel John Screven, in response to 
the toast, " The Sons of the Revolution " — has been 
prepared and printed in this elegant form as a 
souvenir of the occasion, the edition being limited 
to the number of members subscribing to the 
dinner. 

To the thoughtlulness and liberality of Mr. 
Wymberley Jones De Renne, great-grandson of 
the Honorable Noble Wymberley Jones, who, 
during the struggle for American Independence, 
was "conspicuous for purity of purpose, wisdom 
of counsel and fearlessness in action," are we 



indebted for this beautiful specimen of the printer's 
art, which is, at the same time, a pleasing reminder 
of a most enjoyable event in our Society's history. 

Wm. Harden, 

Secretary. 

Savannah, Ga., February, 1892. 



SONS OF THE REVOLUTION. 



Gentlemen : — In endeavoring to respond to the 
first toast of the evening, " The Society of the 
Sons of the Revolution," I will confine my remarks 
to a brief exposition of the objects and value of 
this honorable association. 

This society having adopted the constitution of 
the general Society of the Sons of the Revolution, 
their objects are identical, namely : " To perpetu- 
ate the memory of the men who, in the military, 
naval and civil service of the Colonies and of the 
Continental Congress, by their acts or counsel, 



achieved American independence, and to furdier 
the commemoration of the anniversaries and the 
prominent events connected with the war of the 
Revolution ; to collect and secure for preservation 
the traditions, rolls, records, and other docu- 
ments, public or private, relating to that period ; 
to inspire the members of the Society with the 
patriotic spirit of their forefathers, and to promote 
the feeling of friendship among themselves." To 
become a member of the association taking such 
high trusts in its keeping, the constitution pro- 
vides that "any male person above the age of 
twenty-one years, of good character, and a descend- 
ant of one who, as a military, marine, or naval 



officer, sailor, or marine, in actual service under 
the authority of any of the thirteen Colonies or 
States, or of the Continental Congress, and remain- 
ing always loyal to such authority, or a descendant 
ofonewhosigned the Declaration of Independence, 
or of one who, as a member of the Continental 
Congress, or of the Congress of any of the Colonies 
or States, or as an officer appointed by or under 
the authority of such legislative bodies, actually 
assisted in the establishment of American inde- 
pendence by services rendered during the war of 
the Revolution, became thereby liable to conviction 
of treason against the government of Great 
Britain, but remaining always loyal to the author- 



ities of the Colonies or States, shall be eligible to 
membership in the Society." 

A WIDER ORGANIZATION. 

I have thus taken the liberty of presenting these 
clauses of our constitution, in order that such 
gentlemen as have not had access to the text 
itself may have clear apprehension of the purposes 
of the Society and the necessary qualifications of 
its members. Hitherto the only association in this 
country intended to promote the same objects is 
the Society of the Cincinnati, whose membership, 
so far as Americans were concerned, was wholly 
confined to commissioned and brevet officers of 



10 



the army and navy of the United States. This 
limitation of membership to a circumscribed class 
of the patriots of the Revolution may have been 
justly adapted to the conditions of the times in 
which it was established ; but it barred from ad- 
mission to the order all others of the patriots of 
the Revolution, whose services were as essential 
to the cause of American liberty as those of the 
commissioned officers of the Continental or United 
States Army. Civil officers of the State or Colonial 
governments of the most eminent character, dis- 
tinguished for great abilities, for severe personal 
sacrifices, and unstinted devotion, without whom 
any form of government or political organization 



and the conduct of the cause itself were impossible, 
were excluded. So, too, the non-commissioned 
officers of the Continental Army and of the State 
militia were ineligible for membership. Sir Will- 
iam Napier, the distinguished author of the history 
of the Peninsular War, wrote that the humbler 
classes of a nation are always the most patriotic 
in time of war. In no instance was this more sig- 
nally true than in the American Revolution, when 
the farmer, who shouldered his musket and went 
to the front, left his home to be plundered, his 
family to almost certain suffering and want. 
Throwing out of view the great fact, that armies 
and navies are of the people, and without the 



people are impossible, who will venture to deny 
the individual valor of the soldiers and seamen of 
the Revolution — the seamen of Paul Jones, Barney 
and Nicholson — the soldiers of Washington, Gates, 
Greene, Lincoln, Wayne and Marion ; and if we 
turn to our own beloved State, whose ravaged 
soil was red with blood from Augusta to Sunbury, 
the impetuous soldiers of James Jackson, who won 
the keys of Savannah. 

A PUBLIC INHERITANCE. 

This grand inheritance is wholly public — an in- 
heritance in which all the people of this great 
country are coparceners. But the members of 



13 



this society have an inheritance peculiarly their 
own, as the blood descendants of the men of the 
Revolution. Enough has been said of their 
achievements ; but it seems, as of course, that the 
duty of gathering and perpetuating the records 
of their careers, whether public or private, should 
devolve upon their descendants, wherever these 
records are as yet unsystematized and unwritten — 
a duty attaching to all classes, whether eminent 
or humble. It is in vain to assert that history 
contains all that is necessary or interesting to be 
known. History deals with facts pertaining to 
nations, seldom with those relating personally to 
individuals, while it is true that civil or military 



14 



bodies are but aggregations of individuals. It 
must, therefore, be also true that the conduct of 
such bodies will depend upon the motives, char- 
acter and actions of their individual components. 
If there is anything true or good, anything great 
or exalted, in the motives and actions of the rev- 
olutionary sires, their sons have a right to claim 
them, not with misplaced or insolent boasting, 
but with "secret joy" and a grateful sense of 
potent obligations to recognized good examples. 
We well know and sadly deplore the difficulty of 
securing such records — a difficulty which began 
with the Revolution itself; when even the public 
records of our own State were secretly moved 



15 



from successive hiding-places until at last they 
found refuge in distant Maryland ; when such 
private records as were not destroyed by the 
torch of the enemy were ransacked and flung to 
the winds, if they contained no evidence of so- 
called treason. It is impossible to estimate the 
ravages of this nature when Provost made his 
raid into South Carolina in 1779, when pictures 
were the special objects of destruction, and so 
the portraits of many distinguished patriots lost 
to posterity. This difficulty will increase with 
advancing years ; and now, before the worm and 
the damp, those stealthy assassins of time and 
death, shall have obliterated them forever, let us 



16 



rescue the too long-hidden records of our sires, 
that we may prove to the world not who or what 
we are, but who and what they were, and the 
illustrious examples they have bequeathed to suc- 
ceeding generations. 

A RIGHT TO BE PROUD. 

It must be acknowledged that the descendants 
of revolutionary sires have some right to enter- 
tain just pride in their ancestry as the founders of 
American independence and as the oldest tenants 
of American soil ; but it should be clearly and 
emphatically understood that the Sons of the Re- 
volution are not tainted with the aspirations of 



>7 



aristocracy. In examining the membership rolls 
of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New 
York it was, therefore, not surprising to find that, 
of 707 members, 158, or over 22 per cent., were 
the descendants of non-commissioned officers and 
private soldiers. Of these, four were officers, who 
have the same equal rights with descendants of 
generals and signers of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. No democracy could be purer, none 
more levelling ; and so the descendants of Apollus 
Austin the fifer, of Philip Schuyler the general, 
William Floyd the signer, of John Jay and Alex- 
ander Hamilton, all claim alike the honors and 
privileges of " the Society of the Sons of the Rev- 
olution." 



18 



And now, gentlemen, a few words in conclusion. 
The last and crowning injunction of the constitu- 
tion of our society is the promotion of a feeling 
of friendship among ourselves. When the great 
bard of Chios chanted the challenge of heroes, 
he sang : 

" Each other's race and parents well we know 
From tale of ancient days ; altho' by sight, 
Nor mine to thee, nor thine to me are known;" 

and so, although we have never in the flesh be- 
held our forefathers, yet in the mind's eye we 
may conceive of their lineaments ; and if there is 
the heredity, in which we may indulge a reason- 
able belief, I feel that we see something at least 



»9 



of their lineaments in the members of this honor- 
able company. They were comrades in the times 
that tried men's souls, bound together by ties of 
singular sacredness ; and even now, when a cent- 
ury has passed over the scenes of their trials and 
their triumphs, and their bodies are but dust, it is 
well for us not only to cherish their noble mem- 
ories, but to feel that they have also handed down 
to us and to our posterity the tender heritage of 
their friendship. 

THE VALIANT JASPER. 

In this same city, within short bowshot of the 
spot where Colonel Walton with his one hundred 



Georgia militia held the rear of the American line 
until the forces of General Howe had passed in 
disorder and panic — within short bowshot of that 
spot is erected a monument of bronze to the heroic 
memory of William Jasper, a simple sergeant in 
the Second South Carolina Regiment, a soldier 
without a commission, but the fame of whose ca- 
reer has passed to all the borders of this vast 
country ; whose name identifies public places, 
towns and counties, and has a page in universal 
biography : yet neither the descendants of this illus- 
trious exemplar of American valor and patriotism 
nor Sergeant Jasper himself, had he lived, could 
find a place in the only association hitherto dedi- 



cated to the sacred memories of the Revolution ! 
So, too, the heroes of the transcendent victory of 
King's Mountain, where nine hundred of the sturdy 
yeomanry of the Alleglianies, hitching their horses 
at the foot of the mountain, and advancing (every 
man for himself), slew and captured eleven hun- 
dred British regulars and tories. On this occasion 
Colonel Cleveland, when about to lead his division 
to the attack, told his men that " every man must 
consider himself an officer, and act from his own 
judgment. ... If any of you are afraid, such have 
leave to retire, and they are requested immediately 
to take themselves off" And yet neither Camp- 
bell nor Cleveland, Shelby, Scott nor Williams, 



all of whom were colonels, but of militia, nor the 
brave yeomen who were to consider themselves 
officers — those noble citizen-soldiers who had 
brought hope and fresh courage to the American 
cause, then sinking to despair in South Carolina — 
nor any of their descendants, could be enrolled in 
the Olympian sanctuary of the Cincinnati. 

It is very far from my purpose or desire to 
depreciate the high merits of the Society of the 
Cincinnati. Organized in 1783, by officers of the 
Revolutionary Army of the United States, to per- 
petuate their friendship, and to raise a fund for 
the relief of the widows and orphans of comrades 
who had lost their lives in the war, its objects 



23 



were of the most exalted character, and should 
have forbidden such an American as Benjamin 
Franklin to fear that it was the initiation of a 
future aristocracy. But what was Achilles with- 
out his Myrmidons, Alexander without his Mace- 
donian phalanx, Caesar without the Tenth Legion, 
Napoleon without the Imperial Guard, or Wash- 
ington without the ragged but indomitable militia, 
who sprang up from the Piscataqua to the Alta- 
maha, and with their bloody bayonets laid the 
foundation of this transcendent republic ? 

A NOBLE PURPOSE. 

And so " The Society of the Sons of the Revo- 
lution " has been organized to supply a deficiency 



24 



akin to national in its demands, to fulfil a duty 
which in times past was either neglected or im- 
possible, and, before it became too late, to re- 
establish and effectually perpetuate the memory 
of the services of all classes of patriots who loyally 
served in any capacity, whether civil or military, 
the cause of American liberty. Nor is this an 
expression of mere sentiment in its common ac- 
ceptation, although it has been said that sentiment 
moves the world. The whole American people, 
but peculiarly the posterity of the bold and de- 
voted patriots of the Revolution, owe them an 
inestimable debt. It is not all that they bared 
their breasts to the storm of battle. It is no 



25 



enough that they staked their fortunes in the con- 
flict. It is not enough that they suffered intoler- 
able privation, want and indignities. It is not 
enough that they were scarred not only with 
wounds of sabre, bayonet and bullet, but by ig- 
nominious fetters. It is not enough that so noble 
a man as Isaac Hayne perished as a felon ; nor 
that their great leaders, such men as Washington, 
Adams, Jefferson, Madison ; nor that Bulloch, 
Habersham, Jones and many others of our 
Georgia sires were liable under British law to in- 
dictment for high treason and to death upon the 
gibbet ; but look around you, sons of revolution- 
ary fathers, upon the priceless inheritance they 



26 



bequeathed — a country, whose boundaries are al- 
most continental, whose territory teems with great 
cities of vast foreign and domestic commerce, 
connected by a system of unequalled internal and 
foreign transportation ; with a population twenty 
times greater than that of the revolutionary pe- 
riod, living under a political constitution enacted 
by the fathers, and which, after the lapse of a cent- 
ury of trial, their happy posterity have seldom 
ventured to amend — a land of such beauty and 
plenty, of such security, prosperity and peace, 
that it is sought of all the peoples of the earth ! 
Look around you, sons of revolutionary fathers, 
and answer whether the perpetuation of the mem- 



a? 



ories of the men who handed down an inheritance 
so illustrious, so sublimely positive in its reality, 
is founded in a sentiment of unsubstantial value, 
and not in lofty truths as immovable from the 
hearts of men as the seated hills ! 



2g 



The Sons of the Revolution 



STATE OF GEORGIA. 



First Annual Dinner 



Savannah, Ga., Februarys, 
1892. 



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BIlUB POirlTS on SHEUIl 

HAUT 5AUTCRNES 



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PONTET CANET 



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ROHST QOnill BHRDHS OM TOAST 

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COFPHB 
THE DE SOTO 



REGULAR TOASTS 



I. THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE REVOLUTION: 
Col. John Scrbven, of Savannah, 

President of the Society in Georgia. 



2. THE FIRST WRITTEN CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE OF GEORGIA: 
Hon. Hugh v. Washington, of Macon. 



3. THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA: 

Hon. Emory Speer, of Macon, 

Judge U. S. Court, So. Dist. oi Ga. 



4. THB DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: 
COL. John Milledge, of Atlanta, 

State Librarian, Historian of the Society in Georgia. 





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